I live in a house of all American girls or rather, All-American Girls. Most of them are named Kate and born in 1982. This is where our similarities end. Their favorite place to go in London is called The American Sports Bar Café. This also happens to be Justin Timberlake’s favorite place to go in London. The American Sports Bar Café is my least favorite place to go in London.
The school I go to is on the other end of town and I’m the only one from my house who goes to this school. I don’t spend much time on my campus because of a violent crime I witnessed the first week I was there (more on this in my upcoming column).
So between my long commute, my different interests, and my reluctance to be on campus longer than I have to, I end up spending time on my own. A lot of time. I consider myself a very independent person, but there are things that happen to me when I spend an extended amount of time on my own: I don’t laugh, I don’t talk, and because there’s no one there to engage my attention, I basically lose control of where my thoughts take me.
I had a writing teacher in high school who was always telling us to “notice the things you notice.” In London, I notice a lot of things, and I’ve noticed that the things I notice tend to be slightly macabre. The toothless drunk on the Park Bench, the expired vegetable of an old man who gets wheeled around my neighborhood everyday by his caretaker, the loner advertising herself for friends in the personals section of the newspaper. Sometimes I go home and wish I could be like the other Katies from the eighties, giddy and getting ready for a night at The ASBC, where if they’re lucky they just might sneak a peak of JT. But that’s not where I am right now.
The other day I was I was standing on a balcony of the Tate Museum, overlooking the Thames, when I found some very dark thoughts of mine interrupted by a splat on the sidewalk beneath me. Something had fallen from the sky. It was a pigeon. How strange, I thought, a birds-eye-view of a bird, it should be the bird up here and me down there. I looked closer at the pigeon and made a horrifying discover. It was not a pigeon; it was only half a pigeon. The other half lay a few feet away. A small group of tourists gathered around the pieces to hold a conference on how this happened. How a pigeon, flying through the air one moment, came to land in two pieces on the sidewalk the next. There were all different languages being spoken, and wild hand gestures did little translate. A group of school boys caught sight of the pigeon and ran over, their faces plastered with wicked smiles, a few giggling with delight. A younger girl knelt beside the pigeon, trying to look composed but looking like her face was about to break. An older woman, gaunt, dressed in black, hair in a bun, with the detached look of a photographer, whipped out a fancy looking camera and began to take pictures of it from different angles. A couple walking hand-in-hand stopped to take in the spectacle before continuing down the river. What are museums, for, I wondered, it’s all right here, the essence of all humanity in all its banality: the cruel laughter, the morbid curiosity, the genuine distress, a desire to record the incident, a need to make sense of it.
As if nervous about the competition the bird was creating, it was only a matter of minutes before the Tate Museum dispatched an employee to go out and remove the bird. A janitor, whose name I assume was Carlos, for it was written on his tin dustpan, came and swept the bird away, depositing in the waste bin.
Let me tell you, this was no ordinary sight. I’ve heard gross pigeon stories before, but this one was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It was prophetic, it was beyond sinister, and it felt like a message from God specifically directed to me. God, in a rare moment of dark humor saying “snap out of it, snap out of your black mood you silly fool.” Somehow I did.
“Notice the things you notice.” The voice of my old writing teacher told me. “Shut up” I replied.
But I couldn’t help it; couldn’t help noticing how I noticed the way each person noticed this pigeon and the way it seemed to arrest every person’s attention—how for a brief moment we were all utterly transfixed, mystified and completely overwhelmed by the disturbing and yet simultaneously appealing horror of this sight. And then I thought to myself: as much as I like London, I can’t wait until I go home and don’t have to notice noticing all these things anymore. It’s exhausting.
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